


Hurricane Drunk

by piggy09



Category: Killing Eve (TV 2018)
Genre: F/F, Ghosts
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2019-05-30
Updated: 2019-05-30
Packaged: 2020-03-29 14:15:21
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Major Character Death
Chapters: 1
Words: 4,852
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/19021606
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/piggy09/pseuds/piggy09
Summary: Being a ghost is monumentally shitty.(Warnings for the S2 finale within.)





	Hurricane Drunk

**Author's Note:**

> I know the most implausible idea in this fic is that Konstantin will just waltz back and give Villanelle another job like everything's chill, but go ahead and suspend your disbelief for that one.
> 
> [warnings: human & animal death]

Being a ghost is monumentally shitty. Firstly because it means that Eve is dead, which is quite literally the worst thing that has ever happened to her. Secondly because it means she can’t interact with the world around her. Thirdly because she has to hover there and look at her stupid face, stretched-open with the surprise and agony of dying.

 _You should have known better, asshole_ , she tells her body. _What did you expect?_

Her body says nothing, and still manages to make the silence sound stupid.

 _What the_ hell _did you expect?_ Eve shouts at the body, and around her ancient stone spews outwards like a firework. The ruins roar with Eve’s anger – the walls shoot stone, and the stone whirls around frantically and furiously in the air. The walls rattle; they groan. The bones of them slowly settle. Eve’s body continues to lie there, motionless, vacant.

 _Oh_ , Eve says. She touches her lack of fingers to her lack of throat and feels the anger curled up inside there, raw, vivid, animal. She closes her lack of eyes to focus on it. To hold it.

Then she lets go.

The ruins scream and then the walls, one by one, collapse. Eve’s nonexistent heart goes _oh,_ and then _Villanelle_ ; it says that name in a voice like longing. Eve smothers it and pulls the anger out – it extends like a magician’s scarf and does not end. Wall after wall collapses. She can see the horizon. She can’t see Villanelle.

She brings the walls down on her body and buries it, kindly, beneath the dust.

* * *

Heading back into the city, Eve tests the limits of herself – the precision with which she can be furious. A spike of annoyance lets her rip and pull and smash, while cold and calculated anger lets her move things exactly how she’d like them. She can float, and fly, and soar like a bird. If she tries, she can find the birds and reach out and stop their hearts.

 _Villanelle_ , says the quiet voice in her chest again. It sounds like lonely.

 _Shut up_ , she tells it, and moves towards the center of the city, and tries to figure out how to get herself onto a train back home.

Home?

Yes, home. Certainly home. With the food she can’t eat, and the bed she can’t sleep in, and the job that is useless, and the husband who—

— _I’ll worry about that later_ , she tells herself. She slips between the people at the train station, passing through them; when she does the edges of her vibrate and the people in the train station shudder. Eve imagines Villanelle feeling cold. She imagines Villanelle shuddering. She imagines pulling Villanelle open piece by piece – and she imagines it deliberately, because if she lets the imagining go her mind fills up with Villanelle’s shy and thrilled half-smile. The sparkle of her eyes when she’d seen Eve lift that axe

and someone screams, and when Eve turns her head to the side she sees that the train tracks have wrenching out of shape and clawing at themselves

like the sprawl of that man’s limbs, and like

a snake, or maybe a nest of snakes, and they’re waving in the air: frantic, desirous. _Fuck_ , Eve tells them, and then _shit_ , and then _shit!_ , and the terror just twists the tracks up in knots and everyone is screaming and Eve feels herself shake once, twice, like static on a television screen. She looks at her hands. She looks at her hands, she looks at her hands. She closes her eyes. Villanelle walks out of the dark in the back of her brain and says, grinning giddily: _I’ll take care of you._

 _You don’t know shit about how to take care of me_ , Eve tells the memory of her.

 _Maybe not,_ Villanelle says. _But do you?_

Eve opens her eyes again. The tracks have settled. People are still screaming; Eve remembers the way the axe sank into the body of a man, and she remembers the way the birds fell out of the sky, and she thinks: _No, Villanelle. I don’t._

 _You’re so crazy_ , Villanelle tells her fondly. _I haven’t even hallucinated you_ once _. I mean, I imagined you a lot. But not as like a soothing ritual or anything._

 _I want to go home_ , Eve says.

 _Then come find me_ , Villanelle says, and walks back into the dark.

* * *

So Eve scours the city, because she is lonely. She goes back to the caved-in ruins. She hunts the surrounding terrain. She goes to the fanciest hotel she can find; after flipping through the guestbooks for a suitably dramatic name, she abandons them. The next-fanciest. The next-nicest. Her brain draws Villanelle in each of them, sprawled over a hotel bed, flipping through the channels. When the dream doesn’t come true, she gets so angry that the walls shake.

 _Where would you go?_ she asks Villanelle, but Villanelle doesn’t answer her.

What’s funny is that the anger doesn’t go away. Eve pulls on it to move herself, to move the pages of hotel ledgers; she glides through doors and walls and it doesn’t go away. It never gets smaller. There’s a white hot coal in the center of it that just keeps on burning.

So when she kills someone, it’s – easy. Easier than it should be.

She just thinks _I want Villanelle_ and she looks at the Italian hotel clerk chewing mint gum and texting – and she reaches out a hand – and she can feel his heart, or at least the weight of its beating. She closes her fist around it. He falls down dead. It doesn’t feel like anything; _it never does really_ whispers an echo of Villanelle.

It should feel like something but it doesn’t. Really. Eve could kill this city; nothing would change. This is the feeling that Villanelle carries in the center of her chest – the knowledge that she could break the world open and it wouldn’t be anything but a way to spend time.

 _Villanelle_ , says Eve’s lack of heart. This time it sounds like wanting.

 _She’s not here_ , Eve says.

 _Villanelle_ , says Eve’s heart again.

 _She’s gone_ , Eve says.

 _I want to go home_ , Eve says – experimentally, curiously.

 _Okay_ , says her heart.

Eve looks at the man behind the hotel desk: his stupid face, the way it’s all stretched open. She realizes that she should apologize. Then she floats out the door, to go catch a train to London.

* * *

The house is empty. Niko took everything with him when he left her. When she left him. Whatever. The point is that there’s nothing here for her anymore.

Eve floats to the bedroom anyways, kicks her legs against nothing to make herself horizontal on the bed. When she closes her eyes, she sees the tunnels underneath the city; she sees herself bobbing behind Villanelle like a child’s balloon. _Stupid_ , she tells herself. _Stupid, what did you expect._

Villanelle chatters about the future, like they can still live in it. Like there’s a place there, for them, in it. This isn’t dreaming or anything; it’s just remembering. Eve remembers the feeling of blood drying on her skin. She remembers Villanelle. The house doesn’t smell like anything, and it isn’t a home. She remembers when it felt like a home – that’s dreaming.

She opens her eyes again. She stares at the ceiling.

 _I don’t want to find Villanelle_ , she lies.

No made-up voice answers her.

 _Yeah_ , she says. _I know_. She gets up again, and takes in the empty house, and floats towards the front door. She feels dejection curlde in the pit of her stomach and go hot, sour, real. Eve clenches the anger in her fists until all of her bones feel warm; one by one, each window and mirror and glass picture frame shatters into shards. _I miss you_ , she thinks, _I miss you I miss you I miss you_ and she’s furious. Broken glass floats around her in fractured orbit. It swirls so fast that it cuts the air to ribbons – the only sound is the hissing whisper of glass slicing nothing. Eve misses:

And while she’s doing that, she lets the glass go. Piece by piece it breaks on the ground, and Eve leaves the empty house behind her.

* * *

It takes ages of waiting around Carolyn’s house for Konstantin to come back. Eve knows he’ll come back, if she waits long enough, but that doesn’t make the waiting bearable. She floats through the rooms. She nudges all of Carolyn’s furniture an inch to the left – not a centimeter, an inch. Just to be petty. She floats outside of Kenny’s room for almost six hours, trying to find a way to apologize that won’t make him shit himself. _You were right about Villanelle_ —but he wasn’t, really. _I shouldn’t have gone—_ but she couldn’t have stayed.

 _I should have trusted you_. That one’s true, but she still can’t say it. When he comes back, finally – dark bruises under his eyes, hair sticking up in every direction – Eve waits for the pang of fondness to hit her heart. It does not. Eve’s heart sings _lonely_ and sings _angry_ and whispers _Villanelle_ and there isn’t very much feeling left for Kenny at all.

 _I’m still sorry_ , she tells it. Stubbornly.

 _Stop being so sorry_ , Villanelle says; the echo of her voice makes Eve jump, bob up towards the ceiling of Carolyn’s sterile white hallway.

 _You don’t mean it_ , Villanelle says. _You’re not even a good liar. Stop lying. Come find me already, Eve_.

 _I’m working on it_.

_Really? Konstantin’s downstairs and you’re sitting here moping over a boy you don’t give two shits about, come on._

_Konstantin’s downstairs?_ Eve says, but she’s already soaring through the walls and walls and doors and there he is, Konstantin, in Carolyn’s kitchen. He’s sitting at her breakfast bar and crunching on a piece of toast. He doesn’t look tired. He’s humming.

Eve hovers so her pointed toes almost touch the floor; she watches him, unblinking. He doesn’t even look in her direction. She holds out her hand, cups nothing, feels the shuddering steady weight of his life in her hand.

 _Don’t be a bitch, Eve_ , says Villanelle. _If anybody deserves to kill that guy it’s me._

Eve twitches her fingers. Konstantin’s heart twitches in his chest, pulses, palpitates. He puts down the toast and frowns and touches fingers to his wrist and Eve does it again, earthquakes him. Once more. She waits and watches and watches and waits and when the whites of his eyes go shiny with fear she lets his heart go.

 _Petty_ , Villanelle says. _You know I don’t think he even had anything to do with it?_

 _I don’t care_ , Eve says.

 _Good,_ Villanelle says, _so good, see! I told you. I_ told _you._

_Told me what?_

Villanelle doesn’t answer; she has paced back into the dark catacombs in the back of Eve’s brain, patient and silent. Eve is left with is Konstantin: his toast crumbs, his off-tune humming, his fat stupid heart.

 _Petty_ , she mouths to herself, and she tips the edge of the plate enough to knock it off the counter: shatter. Konstantin jumps. He swallows. When Eve plunged the axe into that man’s head, it had felt like stepping into her body for the very first time. Like inhabiting. Like living.

The shards of pottery tremble on the ground. Eve digs the intangible heels of her nonexistent hands into her eye sockets. _I’m coming_ , she tells Villanelle, _I’m coming back_. She pantomimes breathing. When Konstantin stands up from the counter, Eve sticks to him like glue.

* * *

It only takes a day or so, which is sort of depressing when Eve thinks about it.

* * *

She kills nine birds and almost kills a woman driving a Subaru in the lane next to Konstantin. She doesn’t, but. She wants to. She wants to watch the cars hitting. She wants to watch the glass shatter.

* * *

“Stop moping,” Konstantin says. He throws open the curtains. “Get up. Chop chop. Sorry about your bad breakup, blah blah, we have work to do.”

Villanelle

is lying sprawled across the bed, eyes glazed. She is twirling a gun around her index finger like a fidget spinner; her hair is in a loose ponytail, and she’s wearing a strappy combination of black leather and lace. “Shut up,” she says. “I don’t give a shit about you anymore. Go away.”

“You should give a shit about me,” Konstantin says, “eh? I am going to give you something to do.”

“I don’t _care_ ,” Villanelle says. She kicks one foot off the bed, points the gun at the ceiling, pulls the trigger. Click: blank. Eve watches Konstantin jump anyways and then immediately pretend he didn’t jump.

“You will,” Konstantin says.

“No I won’t.”

“Yes you will.”

“No I won’t.”

“Yes you will.”

“No I won’t.”

“You have ten minutes to change into something that doesn’t smell like ass,” Konstantin says, and lets himself out of her apartment. The door slams behind him.

Villanelle doesn’t move. She puts the gun against her head and pulls the trigger click blank. She sticks out her tongue, rolls out her eyes, lolls her head back against the bed like a kid playing dead. _Bleh_. When she looks up at the ceiling, her eyes are wet.

 _Villanelle_ , says Eve’s heart. Eve swims through the air to her, threads her fingers through her anger and pulls. The gun tugs itself out of Villanelle’s hand.

Villanelle jackknife-twitches and sits up, hands fisted into the bedspread. In midair, the gun circles around and points back at her.

“What the _fuck_ ,” Villanelle says.

Click: blank.

“Eve?” says Villanelle. Her voice sounds like: longing, lonely, wanting.

Eve’s anger is curled around the trigger; it isn’t enough. Eve can’t stop looking at the desperate trembling of Villanelle’s face.

 _Fuck_ , Eve snarls. The gun slips and clatters to the ground.

“ _Eve_ ,” Villanelle says. She pulls herself urgently to the edge of the bed, drops her feet on the ground, leans forward like a magnet being tugged. “Eve. I shouldn’t have shot you okay I _know_ it was stupid—” she blinks, once, twice. “Wait. Are you a ghost?”

 _Obviously I’m a fucking ghost_ , Eve tells her. With a sigh she yanks the gun up from the ground, moves it up – down – up. Like nodding.

“Wow,” Villanelle says. She leans back on her hands. “That’s super weird.”

Up – down – up.

“I didn’t think it would kill you,” Villanelle says. “I thought you would just go to the hospital and, you know, think about how much you missed me. Have some time to cool off! Maybe try medication or something, I don’t know. You weren’t supposed to _die_ , Eve.” Her tone is flippant but her eyes are shining, darting around the room like Eve will step out of invisibility if she just looks hard enough.

 _I killed someone_ , Eve says. _I mean. Besides the guy I already killed. I killed someone and it felt – I don’t know. Not like anything, I guess._

“But if you’re back – does that mean you aren’t mad at me?”

_I thought maybe it would feel like something. If I was with you._

“Eve? Are you still there?”

 _I want to feel things with you_.

Villanelle cups her hands around her mouth and yells: “ _Hey!_ ” The sound ricochets off the walls. Anger sparks up again inside of Eve and she twirls it around in her hand, pulls just _there_ on Villanelle’s ponytail holder. It snaps. Villanelle’s hair spills over her shoulders and Eve twists anger-fingers into it, combs nothing through the honey of Villanelle’s hair.

“Hi,” Villanelle says.

 _Hi_ , Eve says. Villanelle’s expression is blissful; she radiates light like a sun. Eve haloes Villanelle’s hair out around her so that she’s encompassed by light and gold.

“This is so crazy,” Villanelle says, ecstatic, biting on the edge of a giggle. “Did you know this would happen?”

Eve wiggles a chunk of Villanelle’s hair back and forth: _no_.

“Me either,” Villanelle says. “Do you wish it hadn’t?”

 _Yes_.

“Yeah,” Villanelle says. “Me too. I really liked touching you, Eve. Your skin was very soft.”

There isn’t really an answer to that, besides the soft pangs of Eve’s lack of heart. Eve just braids chunks of Villanelle’s hair together at whim. She misses having a body, even when that body didn’t want to touch Villanelle. It’s probably still buried under rubble back in Italy. It’s probably rotting, softly.

 _BANG! BANG BANG!_ on the door. Villanelle rolls her eyes and blows a raspberry. “I’m _changing_ ,” she yells. “You said ten minutes!”

“I changed my mind,” comes Konstantin’s voice, muffled through the door. “Two minutes.”

“You suck so bad!”

“One minute fifty seconds!”

Villanelle groans, exaggerated, and then stands. “Are you still mad?” she says. “About me killing people.”

Eve picks up the gun and wobbles it, trying to think of an answer.

“You can just say no,” Villanelle says. “It’s okay. Ghosts can do whatever they want, you know? You don’t have to pretend to be normal anymore.” She shifts her weight from foot to foot, just a little.

Eve twirls the gun around a nonexistent finger and offers its barrel to Villanelle. Villanelle’s face blooms into a smile; she takes the gun. “You want to see?” she says, and then twists the barrel open.

There’s a bullet in it. Just one. But it’s in there.

Villanelle snaps the gun shut again and shoves it into some mysterious and invisible pocket in the black-lace-leather thing. “You could have killed me,” she says. “Again.”

 _I didn’t want to_ , Eve tells her.

“We have to find a way to show if you’re there or not, huh?” Villanelle says, obliviously. “Do you want a bell? Like a cat or something. We can put your name on it.”

Eve yanks a lock of Villanelle’s hair. Villanelle yowls, frowns, mutters: “Just an idea, jeez.

“I knew you didn’t want to kill me,” she whispers smugly. Then she pulls her hair back into another pin-neat ponytail and charges out the door, glowing with how she’s completely and utterly alive.

* * *

“Eve?” Villanelle says, and Eve blows a gust of wind through the leaves on the street.

“Eve?” Villanelle says, and Eve rings the bell of a nearby bicycle.

“Eve?” Villanelle says, and Eve reaches out and brushes up against Villanelle’s heart. She feels it shiver, shudder. Villanelle stops walking. They’re in a hallway lit only by dim and flickering lamps; Villanelle looks like a vampire, or something else that isn’t allowed to be real.

“Did you do that?” Villanelle says.

Eve turns the lamp off. The darkness is noisy, but it’s only because people are moving in nearby rooms. Villanelle isn’t making any noise at all.

“Do it again,” Villanelle says.

Eve turns the light back on.

“No,” Villanelle says, “not that.”

 _Obviously not that_ , Eve says. She crushes her own strange and growing excitement, the sharp thrill. She turns the lamp off. She turns it on again. Off, on, off, on, off. _I think death made me really immature_ , she tells Villanelle.

“Wow, okay,” Villanelle says. “So dying made you a total baby, got it.” She keeps on walking, pulling a knife out of her pocket and rubbing it with the pad of her thumb. Eve stays frozen in the hallway, watching Villanelle; she can’t stop watching Villanelle, who said what Eve said exactly.

Eve stays in the hallway, where she is – in a pool of light that just can’t touch her – until Villanelle says her name again. Then she rushes to finally catch her.

* * *

“Eve?” Villanelle says, and Eve draws a wavering line in the pool of blood on the ground. They both listen to him choke through the bubbling mess of his throat.

“Would you do it to him?” Villanelle says, very quietly. “Please? I won’t ask you for anything else, I promise. I just want to see.”

 _I want that too_ , Eve says, voice even quieter. She lowers herself until she’s crouched next to Villanelle; she reaches out the tender tendrils of her anger and winds them around the man’s heart. She closes her fist and the heart stops. She opens it and the heart goes again and faster.

 _I wanted you to ask_ , Eve tells Villanelle. _Is that crazy? That’s totally crazy. I’m crazy_.

It feels good. Bringing this man to the edge of dying and walking him back again, and also being crazy. They both feel good.

Villanelle is leaning in close to the man’s face; in his eyes, Eve can just see Villanelle reflecting and reflecting forever.

“Please?” Villanelle says again, soft and gentle and starving.

 _Okay_ , Eve says, and she does.

* * *

Villanelle is so fidgety and alive that Eve swears she’s going to start throwing off electric sparks. _Are you always like this after you kill someone?_ Eve asks. _I feel like you usually aren’t this – I don’t know. Horny?_

Villanelle says nothing; she keeps humming under her breath. On the walk away from the corpse she has hummed – by Eve’s estimation – thirty different songs, switching between them every four seconds like the radio of her brain is breaking down. Eve recognizes none of the songs. The place where she should have a heart is hurting, and it’s murmuring something about the little downy hairs at the base of Villanelle’s neck. They’re gold. Eve reaches out and ruffles them, just a little bit.

Villanelle’s eyes twitch in a direction where Eve isn’t, and then away again. A smile teases the corner of her mouth. “Hi,” she says.

 _Hi_ , Eve says. _Where are we going?_

Like Villanelle is answering her, she makes a sharp right turn into the doorway of a shop. Inside, Taylor Swift is singing at the top of her lungs through a set of invisible, tinny speakers; the shelves are full of teddy bears and overpriced dolls, and the floor is full of shrieking sugar-fueled kids. Eve realizes that they remind her of little birds and then she has to stop and look at her hands until they stop flickering out.

Further down the aisle, Villanelle has set off nine singing toys at the same time. _Christ_ , Eve says. She propels herself after Villanelle, deeper into the toy store – past the action figures, by the Legos. Villanelle has pulled out the knife again, seemingly just for kicks.

She screeches to a halt by the board games and frowns at The Game of Life for a focused second. _Not an option_ , Eve tells her, and knocks it off the shelf. Villanelle cackles.

“No, come on,” she says. “We should play it, it’d be funny.” She picks it up again and tucks it under her arm, and then stretches up on tip-toes to grab another box: a Hasbro-branded Ouija board.

 _That’s even less funny_ , Eve tells her.

“You’re mad, aren’t you,” Villanelle says. “But think about it – this way we can talk to each other again, huh?” She heads back down another aisle, the boxes tucked under her arm. In her hand, she’s still holding the knife.

It only takes a little bit of fury to get the knife out of Villanelle’s hand and send it, spinning, across the aisle. It lands with a dull squeak in a stuffed dog, which then falls over. Eve and Villanelle both watch it hit the ground.

 _I could do it_ , Eve tells her. She rolls out her shoulders and feels each individual toy in the aisle vibrate.

Villanelle cocks her head to the side. Eve watches her eyes roll around the store like canny marbles.

“Do it,” Villanelle says.

Eve laughs; she can’t help herself. The sound is hysterical, raw, real – and also it doesn’t sound like anything. Also, no one can hear her.

 _Okay!_ she says. _Okay_. She throws her hands out into space. The world explodes in a puff of cotton and dust.

* * *

They’re both laughing when they run away from the store, but the world can only hear Villanelle. Villanelle: her hair all loose and messy, her outfit immaculate. Two board games tucked under her arm. She points a finger gun at a planter, and Eve fires: bang! A car: bang! A chunk of street: bang!

“Eve,” Villanelle yells, over the chaos; she’s hiccuping with laughter, with the way delight is burning her up like a star. “You are amazing! Do you know that? Huh? You are _amazing_.”

Eve laughs right back at her and picks up all the broken pieces. She whips them through the streets like a tide, swirls them around Villanelle, drops them again. She can do anything.

“Holy shit,” Villanelle says. “We can do _anything_.” Her eyes glint like bullets, like every combination of sex and danger. Her tongue darts out to touch one sharp canine tooth.

“So,” she says, “seriously. Can we play the board game or what.”

* * *

Eve flicks the spinner; it lands on 9, and she moves her little car that many squares along the board. Villanelle slurps up more spaghetti. “Hey,” she says, “you’re getting married! Congratulations.”

Eve floats up one of the little pink pegs and nestles it in her bright red car. She watches the way Villanelle smiles, puckered-up and pleased.

* * *

When the game is done, Villanelle leaves the board and pieces scattered on the ground and jumps onto the bed; she lands flat on her back, limbs akimbo, watching the ceiling. “I can’t believe you won,” she says. “That game is so stupid. Dead people shouldn’t be allowed to win, right? That should be in the rules or something.”

Eve picks up the two little cars and divests them of their passengers, places them carefully back into the box. She sorts all of the jobs and all of the houses into order. She piles the money in perfect stacks: fives, tens, fifties. On the bed Villanelle has rolled over onto her stomach and she’s watching.

“I’m really sorry,” she says. “About shooting you and everything. I’m _sorry_. Okay?”

 _I know_ , Eve says. She slots the fake currency into its trays. _I don’t think you’re lying_ , she tells Villanelle; _I really think you’re sorry. You wish you hadn’t done it. You’re so mad that you can’t undo it. I’m not mad at you. At least I don’t think I am. I don’t know._

Villanelle rolls over onto her side and stares at the set-up ouija board. “Please say something, Eve.”

Eve folds up the board, careful as she can be. She puts the game away. She takes another piece of her anger and curls it around the planchette, hovering it, searching for the right words to say.

 _F_ , she says, and then _R-E-E_.

“Yeah?” Villanelle says.

Eve moves the planchette to _YES_ , and closes the box.

* * *

The darkened room – the slither of streetlights under the curtain, the rise and fall of Villanelle’s breath in the bed. Eve stretches herself out into the world, closes her eyes and feels the hearts of each and every bird. She winds the cords of their lives tighter and tighter around their fingers.

“Eve,” Villanelle says, her voice husky and soft in the dark.

Eve opens her eyes. Outside, the birds die. _Yeah?_ she says.

“Eve,” Villanelle says, “could you do it? Please?” Her voice cracks on the word _please_.

 _This is a bad idea_ , Eve says, kneeling down on the bed next to Villanelle. _I could kill you._

She reaches out one spectral hand, flexes it, plunges it into Villanelle’s chest. She wraps her fingers around Villanelle’s heart.

 _I won’t,_ she says. _But, I mean. I could_.

Villanelle’s eyes snap open. In Eve’s palm, her heart stops completely. The blood in Villanelle’s veins ruins itself. Her skin changes color,

slowly,

 

like dawn coming,

 

 

—and Eve lets her heart start up again. Villanelle sucks in one desperate breath and then starts coughing, rolls over. She wheezes. Coughs. Wheezes some more.

“Thank you,” she says. Her voice is as shy as a child’s.

“I love you,” she says, and rolls back over to fall asleep again. Her breathing is immediately deep and smooth and easy.

 _I love you too_ , Eve says. She watches the corner of Villanelle’s dreaming mouth crook upwards into a smile.

* * *

They’re driving too fast in a bright red car. Villanelle is laughing at something indescribable, and Eve is – Eve is everywhere. Eve is the sky, holding the birds and choosing not to kill them yet; Eve is the tires, Eve is the road, Eve is the engine, Eve is the mad trembling of Villanelle’s pulse in her throat. She is the whole world poised on the edge of dying. She holds the weight of Villanelle’s heart in her hand, red and whole; her name is Eve.

“Where do you want to go?” Villanelle yells, and lifts her hands from the wheel. Eve twists the wheel to the right just in time to keep them from crashing over the edge of the road, spiraling down into the sea. She’s so angry. It feels exactly like love.

She loves; she presses down on the gas pedal. Villanelle’s smile goes electric. Eve shoves the vehicle forward, faster, until they’re both flying.

**Author's Note:**

> And you can't hold me down  
> 'Cause I belong to the hurricane  
> It's gonna blow this all away
> 
> And I never felt so alive  
> And so dead  
> \--"Hurricane Drunk," Florence + the Machine
> 
> Thanks for reading! Please kudos + comment if you enjoyed!


End file.
